We’re pleased to announce the following $15,000 Rattle Poetry Prize winner:

“Shoes”
L. Renée
Photo (above) by Jeffrey Albright, The Peter Bullough Foundation

L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer living in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she works as Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize, has been published in Obsidian, Tin House Online, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. The granddaughter of a West Virginia coal miner and proud Black Appalachians, her work has won the Indiana University Guy Lemmon Award for Public Writing, Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, and second place for the Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize. She has garnered fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The Watering Hole, and her work has been supported by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Inc., the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, among others. L. Renée holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. (web)

 

Finalists:

“Conduction”
Francesca Bell

“Palimpsest”
George Bilgere

“Basic Needs”
Sarah Ederer

“Augury”
Jennifer Griffith

“Slut”
Elizabeth Hill

“Diary Poems”
Richard Jordan

“Your Hands”
Shannan Mann

“Projection”
Candace Moore

“Patsy”
Kaitlin Reynolds

“Baseball”
B.A. Van Sise

 

These eleven poems will published in issue #78 of Rattle. Each of the Finalists are also eligible for the $5,000 Readers’ Choice Award, selected by subscriber vote in February.

Two additional poems, by Joshua Mensch and Ross White, were selected for standard publication were offered a space in the open section of a future issue.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition, which would not have been a success without your diverse and inspiring poems. We received 4,010 entries, and it was an honor to read every one of them.